The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Fine.’ She circles round to the boxes on which he and his son have been sitting.

  ‘Good,’ he says, and again, already he is searching for conversation, ‘Good. I wanted to tell you I had a call.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A message. From your mother.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sits down, stretching her legs. A tiredness settles over her, as if the evening has already lasted into the small hours. For a moment, like déjà vu, she has the sense of being an outsider again in a place with strange laws. Like the travellers in old stories, she thinks. Visitors of the Sidhe. Unfortunate guests. ‘I didn’t know she was going to do that. She didn’t tell me.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ He pauses. ‘She sounded impressive.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re very different.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You said it yourself, once.’ He hesitates again. ‘She said you’d have a letter for me?’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Something about your sister, and a loan.’

  ‘I don’t want to take your money.’ She says it quietly, she could be speaking to herself.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really, it’s not a problem –’ Eager, hurrying, forgiving her insult. ‘You don’t have to say anything now, I’d like to, it’s an easy thing for me –’

  ‘I don’t want your money, John.’

  ‘Alright,’ he says, and stops. ‘Okay.’

  The silence grows between them, thick as dust, until she can’t bear not to break it. And then he has done it first.

  ‘It used to mean a lot to me.’ He is smiling again, not at her now but at the goods around them, the halls and ziggurats of crates. ‘Nathan’s the same. More of everything, that’s what he wants. He’s never gone short of anything, but it’s always been the same worry for him. Everything coming to nothing.’ He trails off into the waiting silence, edgy, searching already for a way to break it again. ‘If I was even ten years younger I wouldn’t believe you could say no to an offer like that.’

  ‘You’re very close,’ she says, and is glad when it pulls him up short. Wrong-footed, he looks back at her.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You and Nathan.’

  ‘Yes. We are, yes.’

  ‘He means a lot to you.’

  ‘He means everything to me. Anna –’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told him about the code,’ she says, and waits for the time it will take him to answer.

  ‘You know, then,’ he says finally; almost, Anna thinks later, with relief. ‘I wasn’t sure. When did you – ?’

  ‘Oh, John. It doesn’t matter, does it?’

  ‘To me.’ He sits down opposite her. The board still between them. ‘It matters a little, to me. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you tell the Revenue?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What would they do, do you think –’

  ‘John,’ she says, the name a refusal. The anger reaches her finally, as if the alcohol has dulled its progress. Her voice trembles, and it shocks her. It is not how she would ever speak to a client, and she wonders when she stopped thinking of John as that.

  ‘I’m sorry. Really I am. It’s in no way certain.’ Encouraged, the animation creeping back into his face. ‘Nothing’s happened yet. It may be that nothing will –’

  ‘The account in Nathan’s name,’ she says, not to stop him, although it does. ‘You set it up years ago. You knew something was wrong then, didn’t you?’ She watches him, trying to be sure of his answer, but he won’t look at her. ‘A box full of real gold. And you didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t you tell anyone?’

  He shrugs it off. ‘There are people who would have found out anyway. There are others who worked it out for themselves, but most of the time no one listens to them. It isn’t pleasant to distrust money. Look – I never said my work was perfect. People wanted to believe it, and I let them. It was what they wanted, it was what I wanted. But cryptography isn’t a perfect science. The night I invented Soft Gold I thought I’d done something so near perfect, that no one would ever – no one would find the measure of the nearness. But I was wrong. I’ve known it for years. But I did think – I believed I had –’

  After a moment he runs a thumb quickly across his mouth, along the upper lip where the sweat has settled. ‘They could be wrong, though. I’ve tried to break it,’ he goes on, half to himself. ‘And always failed. That’s to be expected, of course. The advantage will lie with others, and the less alike we are the better for them. I can’t think of everything. It’s what I can’t think of that will be the end of it. It isn’t that everyone thinks of everything, only that someone will always think of something. One day, someone will find the measure by which my work falls short, and they’ll work at it until the numbers crack. There’s no shortage of people who would love to see it happen. There are those who want to break Soft Gold just because it’s there. It’s their golden mountain, and they’ll never give up until they… they’re not fools, either. Not all of them. I’ve watched them. They’re becoming more organised. They write to me. I try not to read the messages, but sometimes they get through. Have they talked to you – ?’ And when she doesn’t answer, ‘Anna, listen, I’ve been working on this for years, a decade or more now, and I think I almost have it. I could stay one step ahead, if I knew what they meant to do. What I mean is, I’ve been perfecting a new design, and if – if you could just let me have a little more time –’

  He is stuttering, stumbling over the words. If she didn’t know him it would surprise her. She knows too much about lies not to understand what he is doing to himself. ‘Why did you tell him?’ she says, and he grins with unhappiness.

  ‘Ah, no. You’ve got it wrong, that wasn’t how it was. It was worse. I was working all night. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up he was reading my notes. He’d already worked it out for himself. He was proud, he wasn’t worried. It was only later he realised what I was doing, and what it meant –’ He looks into her face, searching. ‘I swear it. Anna. Please. Try and believe me.’

  ‘That’s the second rule.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The second rule of tax inspection. Never believe the client,’ she says, still angry, too angry, and he frowns, angry a little now himself.

  ‘Is that what I am?’

  ‘It’s what you were. And you lied, John, you lied to me all the time! And you knew what it was doing to him!’

  ‘I knew, and I knew what it would do to him if I gave up. To him and to uncountable others. I never meant to hurt anyone, I thought I could give them something –’

  ‘Oh, don’t. What about Pandora? How good was that for the uncountable others?’

  ‘Anna, that was decades ago, I was just a child then –’

  ‘Like Nathan,’ she says. ‘A child like Nathan,’ and watches as he folds.

  ‘I’m trying to make things right –’

  ‘Right? Who elected you to decide what’s right?’

  ‘No one. Anna, don’t be like this –’

  ‘What about the right to know? Is that not right enough for you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t help. It would be the worst thing. This is business, not politics. What should I do, then, what should I say? “I’m sorry to announce that mistakes have been made. Please don’t be alarmed. Remember your savings will always be safe with SoftMark, where the new millennium is now available.” Money is trust, Anna, that’s all. Break it and you have nothing.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be like that.’ She shakes her head, driving herself on, willing him and his conviction away, though she is tired of it already. She wishes they could stop. ‘I knew there was something, but I couldn’t be sure. I wouldn’t let myself realise. I never thought you’d be so stupid, that you’d do anything so –’

  He stands, as if no longer able to sit
beside her. ‘Please. It’s nothing yet. Nothing’s certain. There’s nothing yet to be afraid of.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t know if I could trust you.’ He stops beside her, not touching. ‘I thought I could, but I wasn’t sure. I don’t know now. Anna.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I trust you?’

  It takes a while for her to consider it. A minute to find it in herself to laugh. The anger in her winding itself out to a hollow ache.

  ‘What is it?’ John says, and reaches for her, his hand on her shoulder, her neck.

  ‘It’s funny. All the time I’ve known you, and I was asking myself the opposite. Maybe it was the wrong question.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Whether I could trust you.’

  She gets to her feet. At the periphery of her vision she can sense John’s presence. It is almost threatening, as if in his bewilderment he might try to reach out and stop her. As if he might box her up with the uncountable gifts. She is abruptly aware of how much bigger he is than her, and how alone she is, whenever she is with him: how alone they always are, together. And I am the threat, she thinks, after all.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks. And then, ‘Not like this.’

  She puts her hand to his cheek. He doesn’t close his eyes, as she would have done herself. She holds his face as if she could memorise it. But he looks so unlike himself – lost and ashamed – and it is not how she would choose to remember him.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Anna,’ he says, as if he is asking for something, though she has no idea what, and she wonders if he does, either. Later it occurs to her that it is only her silence. As she reaches the door he calls her name again, and then she is out, walking fast, not looking back as she passes down through the stairs and halls of Erith Reach, descending through the places she has been led, the rooms full of laughter and idle revelation, the courtyards of secluded lovers, the mutter of water, the corridors with Miró walls, the letter in her pocket like a weapon, the crowd casting long and mobile shadows, the valets waiting in white gloves, the car warm and dark as a head. And still, creeping in, insistent, indelible, following her out into the ordinary traffic of the city night, there is the smell of gunpowder, which to Anna has always been the smell of Autumn, of Fall, and after tonight always will.

  All night she lies awake and listens to the aeroplanes. Her thoughts are measured in flight paths. Every hour or half hour she is stilled by a sound like something opening, as if the sky has slid apart. Each time, as it fades, there is the soft rush of the motorway: calming, tidal. The airport is less than two miles away. It is something she ceased to notice years ago, so that its sounds come to her now like recollections. They remind her, not of John or of herself, or of what either of them has done, or of who has done who wrong, but of others. Millions of people, more than could ever meet, and more profit and loss than could be accommodated in the thoughts of anyone. The uncountable lives.

  The lives that touch her go on without her. Eve sends her enigmatic flowers two nights before Martha calls, low with gratitude, to thank her: and she accepts both the thanks and the news that Martha’s debts are paid as best she can, with a shadow of guilt but without any real sense of anger or surprise. Less expected is the news that Carl has been promoted over her – his face on a February morning alight with a surplus of joy – but the politics of the Revenue seem distant, and her failure leaves her only with a curious sense of relief, as if a grip has loosened on her of which she was never wholly aware.

  It is spring before she sees Lawrence again, at a small restaurant east of the Angel. He is quieter than she remembers. At the time she thinks it is because of the apology he never gives again, the discomfort of it, and only the next morning does she remember it is because she talked so much herself. Lawrence patiently listening while the food grew cold between them, his keen eyes following her as she talked and talked and said nothing, more grateful than she can allow herself to know that nothing is all he asks of her.

  And in April she calls Tunde Finch. She has kept his card for months, conveniently forgotten in a pocket, but the thought of him is harder to put out of her mind. She leaves a message for him finally, distracting herself into doing it, half hoping for no reply, but he calls back within hours, his voice urgent and eager.

  Their meeting – on an unseasonably warm night broken by rain, when every street smells of wet dog – is less than either might have hoped for. He looks diminished, Anna thinks. Almost wretched, as if Erith Reach gave him some dignity he lacks out in the real world. There is a rash of eczema across one side of his neck, rising up under the hairline, which he scratches or touches as he talks, as if for luck. Their conversation is stilted as they walk along the river from the Tower to the Needle.

  ‘You like him,’ Tunde says, the Thames at his far side turning seawards, so that if Anna looks at it too often it is as if they are walking backwards, like people in bad dreams.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘No reason. I like him too.’

  She slows her pace. ‘Really?’ she says, and he smiles, but thinly, this time. No longer quite so likeable himself.

  ‘Alright. You’ve got me. But I do respect him. I admire his talent. You know, back in the 1950s, the first computer programmers used to play a game called Core Wars. What they did, you see, they made organisms out of numbers. Then they would see which one could take over a computer. That’s how viruses started. That’s what those early programmers were making, they just didn’t know it yet. Soft Gold is a virus too, a tame virus. Mister Law has been playing Core Wars for a long time now, and he’s been on a winning streak. An admirable streak, but nobody wins for ever. Nobody would permit it. It goes against the public grain. I’m not the one who’s going to hurt him.’

  ‘Then who is? Do you know?’ she asks, and he shakes his head, perhaps only declining to answer, the street lights beyond him wrapped in iron vines and monstrous fish.

  ‘Do you remember Bill Gates? “I’m waiting for the anticlimax.” That’s what he had to say about failure. He knew it comes to everyone in the end. Mister Law knows it too. They say he can’t break his own code. I’ve always wondered if that’s true. They say so much – they talk so much they never listen. It changes without human intervention, have you heard that one? That’s supposed to be a strength. But I think it cuts both ways. If no one knows how Soft Gold will change, how long before they realise if it changes for the worse? Will he know, do you think? Anna?’

  But Anna doesn’t answer, and when the second cryptographer asks her what she has done, who she has told, what she intends to do, she has no answers to those questions either. No answers and no excuses, so that his face falls and his voice becomes edged with disappointment – but not, she thinks later, surprise – the gulls above them rising, riding the air, their mewling like an animal mimicry of laughter. At the next Underground station he leaves her without saying goodbye, head down, hands buried in his pockets, shouldering his way into the Westminster evening crowd, and she never meets him again.

  Each morning her office waits for her. It seems ugly to her now, thoroughly unlikeable, half her life and no part of it. A room with a distant view of people, thereby well suited to its purpose.

  She keeps the blinds drawn and takes up smoking. It is a habit which has never attracted her before, but now she finds she likes it. It reminds her of Anneli. The selfish little acts of cigarettes, the way their use measures out time.

  What will she do? Who will she tell? Nothing and no one. It is not a decision she makes. It does not feel like a choice. The sun creeps through the blinds, across her neck, in beads of light.

  It is the thought of John, waiting for her betrayal. It is the glimpse of his desperation. She wishes she could talk to him again, but she cannot bring herself to do so. It feels as if
it is already too late. She would tell him that she is only in possession of the facts, as she has always been. That she has a secret to keep, and that she always keeps her secrets. And that she loves him. She was ready to love him before she ever met him. She would like to tell him that.

  There are days when she attempts to lose herself in her work and others when, as far as she can recall, she does no work at all. The smoke idling from her hand, the thought of John coming to her repeatedly, a dull ache of recollection or imagination, each time different but the same, like variations in music. She spends her days waiting, just as in her thoughts he is always waiting: for her, or for her to act for him. Or waiting as he has always done, she sees now, for a price to be exacted. A man waiting for the fall.

  II

  Fall

  It begins in small ways, in the smallest hours, when there are few to notice and there is little to be done. It shows itself minute by minute, in ways that are easy to doubt, like night weather, rain that might clear by morning. And it happens quietly, and so far from anywhere, that for some time it is as though nothing has happened at all.

  On the island of Copper, in the overheated Quonset huts of the Nikolskoe research station, wearing nothing but unwashed thermal underwear and a ‘From Here You Can See Tomorrow’ T-shirt, Matti Pellinen is dreaming of sober men as she inputs data from the Aleutian Abyssal Plain – its sunken cliffs and isles and spires. It is only in passing that she registers the moment when her screen shudders, the graphics distorting along their peaks and troughs. It is, she thinks, as if a williwaw, an Arctic squall, has passed through its electricity.

  On Ebon, where twenty of Anna’s cigarettes will buy more albacore than a man can eat, the Reverend Toke Tsitsi, Minister for Internal Affairs, checks his savings late at night – it is his personal remedy for insomnia – and has no one to tell (or at least, tells no one) when he finds he has been credited with twice the gross national product of his country. It will come to seem a small thing by morning, though it doesn’t yet appear so to the Reverend, as he waits for light in sleepless joy.